


house of leaves

by arbitrarily



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Magical Accidents, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-06 14:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8756908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: She lived in the woods, apprenticed to a middling witch as most girls who became first birds and then young women did.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [partypaprika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/partypaprika/gifts).



> Happy Holidays!

 

 

They meet again, inside of a tree. 

She lived in the woods, apprenticed to a middling witch as most girls who became first birds and then young women did. Or at least this is how she explains herself to Wirt, once he understands that it is Beatrice, young woman not bird, he is trapped with inside of a hollowed tree the width of an ungenerous phone booth. 

He explains himself to her as a college student who had come home for the holidays. And now, inexplicably, he is here. And even more inexplicably (or perhaps the explanation for the first inexplicability), Beatrice is here. 

They are being rather calm, he thinks, for two people trapped inside a tree. That must mean this is her fault. 

 

 

 

“It’s been a long time,” Wirt says.

“It has not,” she says, purposeful, as if she has to rebut each and every thing Wirt says. It’s too dark inside the tree for Wirt to see what it is Beatrice does with her face, but he thinks she frowns. “It has been a long time,” she says after a long time of her own, somehow, impossibly, managing to make the point – _his_ point – sound like her idea.

“That’s what I said.”

“Hmm?” she says, climbing an octave too high for him to follow. She sounds like the birds who come home in spring. Who build nests out of scraps they find in his backyard, taking the small parts of his world they can carry and making it their own.

That’s romantic, he thinks. If he leans forward he can feel her breath on his neck. That’s terrible. 

 

 

 

“You don’t look the way I remembered,” she says when Wirt finally gets the small plastic lighter he digs out of his pocket to take a flame.

“I could say the same for you.” Beatrice has a round face and freckles but she still has the light and lilting voice of a bird mid-flight. It doesn’t hit him until after he says it that he blew past the most important detail: she had remembered him.  

Her hand covers his suddenly and Wirt’s breath catches. Her fingers skim down the red plastic of the lighter and she clicks her blunt, dirty fingernails against it.

“Curious,” she says.

“Right,” he exhales. “Curious.” The flame flickers. 

 

 

 

“Your clothes are hideous,” Beatrice tells him. He’s dressed in jeans and a pair of muddy boots and a coat that stinks of wet wool. He can’t see her clothes – all of her is shrouded in a dark cloak. Those witches must really require their pupils to dress the part. He says as much, and Beatrice probably arches an eyebrow he can’t see in the shadows, but she definitely makes a _hmph_ sound in the back of her throat. 

There’s an elegance to her though, even here, in the crowded space of a hollow tree. Her elbow knocks into his ribs and Wirt tries to keep himself as still as possible. A tall order; he is anxious and fidgety by nature. It was easier to be Wirt around Beatrice the Bird. Beatrice the Woman is an altogether different animal. Her gaze is much sharper and he can see how easily it could slip into the judgmental. He used to imagine her, the real her, not the bird her (but that was real too, that was still Beatrice even if she wasn’t _Beatrice_ ), accompanying him and Greg so many years ago. He would think: how easy it is to be your honest self with someone you didn’t think was a someone but some bird. 

“Stay still,” Beatrice says, and then, “How’s Greg?” she asks. Like she’s making nervous conversation. Like they don’t teach witches small talk, but then it’s not like anyone bothered to teach Wirt either. 

Wirt shrugs and his shoulder knocks into her, which in turn leads her to knock into him. They are trapped in a tree and a feedback loop of closely confined bodily collision. Like a pinball machine, and maybe they’ll keep bouncing off each other until they either lose momentum or they burst out the other side of the bark. He steadies her with a hand on her hip and she makes that _hmph_ sound again, only softer, less affronted.

“He’s Greg,” he finally says. 

The answer must suffice because she does not have a follow-up.

 

 

 

“How do we get out of the tree?” he whispers, unsure who (or what) precisely it is he fears may overhear them. He figures it’s high time one of them asks the most important question. 

“Oh.” She sighs. “I imagine the same way we got into it.”

“What?” He pauses. “Wait, you don’t know how we got in and you don’t know how to get out?”

“I haven’t learned that much yet!” she hisses.

“You must not have a very good witch boss.”

“Of course I don’t.” She explains it to him then: the hierarchy of apprenticing young women to witches. Girls who went and got themselves turned into birds didn’t rank highly at all. 

“So, what? The good witches only go to the girls who get turned into … bears?”

“No, they go to the girls who were smart enough not to go turning into any animals. Except for demons. Demons are always the exception.”

“Demons?” He pauses again. “You don’t think there’s a demon in this tree, like, now?” 

Beatrice glares at him; he can see that much in their tree-bound gloom. “Where would it fit?”

 

 

 

“How does it work exactly? Magic?” Wirt has decided that magic is a better word than _witchcraft_ , or at the least, it provides him less terrifying imagery. 

“How does it work? It’s,” she pauses. He wonders if witches or magic practitioners (whichever title they prefer) are rarely if ever called upon to explain how their craft works. It’d be like asking a human without a biology degree to explain why you breathe or Greg why he does anything he does at all. You simply do it. “It’s like math,” she finally says. 

“Oh,” Wirt says. That’s not all that helpful; he’s never been very good at math.

“Or chemistry?”

“Oh,” he says again, even more despondent. 

“Or, like writing a song, maybe?”

“Oh!” If Wirt knows anything (doubtful, a solid 45% of the people Wirt has met would say), it’s music.

“It’s like a melody has found you, like it comes over you, and you pluck the notes, the words, the tune itself out of thin air. And then, well.”

“The math and the chemistry?” He considers her, flicks the lighter because he thinks he wants to see her face again. “I should make you a mixtape,” he says with the same gravity most likely spoken by Sir Isaac Newton when he discovered it (see, Wirt knows some things). 

“That sounds nice. I suppose.” She shakes her head. “I don’t what that is.”

“Right. Why would you?” 

She says something then he does not follow, about how magic can be volatile, especially in the hands of beginner on up through intermediate level students.

“What level are you?” he asks.

“Beginner on up through intermediate,” she says, and he would swear on whatever deities or demons have dominion over their tree, she sounds sheepish. 

The truth comes out of her then: she thinks of him, sometimes, accidentally, but only when confronted with someone or something so intractably frustrating, it’s enough to make her want to pull her feathers (or, well, hair, now, but the memory sticks) out. “Learning magic is very frustrating,” and her indignation is back, in case he was getting lonely. 

“You think of me?”

“Only under extreme duress and agitation.”

“Thank you.” 

“I’m teaching myself to travel through the ages.” Not for the first time, Wirt tells himself none of this can possibly be real. He’ll wake up soon enough in his own bed and spend the day with that dulled wrong feeling that serves as a hangover for an all-too-real all-too-familiar dream.  

Instead, he asks, “Why?”

“Why not!” she demands. “It’s encouraging,” she says then, “your being here.” 

“Why,” he still wants to know. 

Beatrice’s voice goes low and quiet and the tree is dark and cold but their bodies are warm enough in such tight quarters. “You’re here, I’m here. Travel through time must be possible.” That wasn’t the question he necessarily wanted an answer to, but he will take it. 

“So,” Wirt says, doing some sort of human calculus between the two of them. “You thought of me when frustrated by your inability to travel through time.” He leans towards her, bumps her body with his again. “That makes me a good luck charm of sorts, right? Kind of?”

“That makes us stuck in a tree.”

They are both quiet. He imagines it: there is a forest that waits outside this tree, he can hear it, feel it like a current in the air. “Like writing a song,” he murmurs. He pictures the forest, a forest he had begun to think he had forgotten, relegated to the same heap every other childhood story stretched by enough surreality that allows it to go half-forgotten as dream or fiction.  

“Oh,” Beatrice says, and she must see it (hear it, feel it), too. One or both of them starts humming. Wirt doesn’t think he is doing anything. It’s more electricity than anything; he is a conduit, he can feel it – whatever it is – rushing through him. Beatrice continues to hum, and it’s not very pleasing, whatever this Escape The Hollow Tree tune is they’ve strung together. And Wirt will never be able to explain it, just as he will never be able to explain how he met Beatrice the Bird in the first place or how a simple tumble led Greg and him into the darkest of forests and darkest of adventures, but the tree is gone and they find themselves among a forest of snow-covered firs. 

Magic.

 

 

 

“Do you know where we are? When we are?”

“Yes,” she says and nods. Wirt looks past her shoulder and can see a small cottage fit for an entirely average witch. They’re back at her home.

“How do I … ” he trails off. It smells like snow and smoke and, maybe, if only in memory, a burning oil lamp.

Beatrice cocks her head and looks at him the same way he bets she considers a spell book or a cauldron or whatever it is real witches and not storybook witches do, or perhaps they all do the same. All stories must come from somewhere. 

“We can figure it out.”

Up close, he can see the freckles sprinkled across her nose and the tops of her very pink cheeks. She has bright eyes, smart eyes, and Wirt has never known how to look a girl in the eye and come away feeling confident and sure. It’s no different with Beatrice. He wants to impress her, but he doesn’t think that’s possible. So he does the next best thing: he kisses her. 

Her nose is cold and so are her lips, but her mouth is hot, tongue wet and alive, and she kisses him like she aims to devour. Her appetite is nothing of a bird’s. Wirt wonders, dimly (his head foggy, mouth preoccupied, hands seeking), if all apprentices to middling witches are taught this very lesson: how to eat a boy alive. 

 

 

 


End file.
